This thesis addresses the question of whether or not online interactional practices are systematically different from interaction in other contexts, particularly spoken interaction. I will establish how the organization of online interaction demonstrates participants orientations to the technological affordances of the online medium. The dataset for the study comprises one-to-one interaction between friends, conducted using the chat application of the social networking site, Facebook. Chat logs and screen capture data were used to analyze how participants engaged in, and managed, their unfolding interaction. The data were analyzed using conversation analysis (CA). CA was developed originally for the analysis of spoken talk, but in this dissertation it provides an empirical basis for comparing Facebook chat and spoken interaction. The thesis demonstrates how CA can be used for analyzing online interaction. The first analytic chapter provides an overview of how participants organize the generic orders of interaction. The findings suggest that participants draw on their knowledge of both spoken and written interaction when managing the particular interactional constraints and affordances of Facebook chat. The second analytic chapter focuses on chat openings, comparing them to openings in spoken interaction. The findings reveal some similarities, but also systematic differences which orient to the design of the chat software. The third analytic chapter examines topic management, including topic-initiation, topic change and the management of simultaneous topics. The findings suggest that the CA categorization of topic-initiating turns could potentially be extended by also analyzing action-orientation and also the epistemic stance displayed. The analysis also reveals remarkable similarities between topic change in spoken interaction and in Facebook chat. Finally in this chapter I show how organizational components of spoken interaction, such as adjacency pairs and tying techniques, are used to manage simultaneous topics. The final analytic chapter focuses on self-repair in Facebook chat. The analysis reveals that self-repairs completed during message construction orient to the same interactional contingencies as self-repairs in spoken interaction. However, the affordances of Facebook chat enable these repairs to be hidden from the recipient. Visible repairs tend to be corrections, with the affordances impacting the sequential placement of such repairs. Finally, I show how participants self-repair in response to the actions of their co-participant. Overall, the findings reveal a number of similarities between the organization of Facebook chat and spoken interaction. The analysis also reveals that participants attend to the technological affordances of Facebook in a variety of ways. Finally, this thesis demonstrates that, while there are differences between the interactional practices of spoken and online written interaction, CA can be used to analyze, and subsequently explain, such differences.

A Tablet PC is a portable computing device which combines a regular notebook computer with a digitizing screen that interacts with a complementary electronic pen stylus. The pen allows the user to input data by writing on or by tapping the screen. Like a regular notebook computer, the user can also perform tasks using the mouse and keyboard. A Tablet PC gives the users all the features of a regular notebook computer along with the support to recognize, process, and store electronic/digital ink, enabling a user to make and save hand-written notes or data. In institutions of teaching and learning, instructors often use computer-based materials like web pages, PowerPoint® slides, etc., to explain subject matter. The ability to annotate on presentation information using the electronic stylus of a Tablet PC has attracted the attention of the academic community to use the Tablet PC as a potential tool for increasing the effectiveness of presentations in teaching and learning. Tablet PC-based applications such as OneNote®, WindowsJournal® and Classroom Presenter have been developed to enhance note-taking in classrooms based on the fact that a pen stylus is a more natural form of input device for making notes on the computer as compared to the regular keyboard and mouse. Although tools like OneNote®, WindowsJournal® enhanced the note-taking process on the Tablet PC, they lacked the ability to allow the user to directly annotate on the lecture content. Classroom Presenter provides the ability to integrate classroom notes and the presentation material by allowing the instructors and students to annotate over the lecture material. However, all the above tools lacked the ability to allow a user to take notes over the output window of an arbitrary application like Excel, an active simulator or a movies players output. The Tablet PC based tool, WriteOn, developed at Virginia Tech, addresses this drawback. WriteOn, when deployed on the Tablet PC in a classroom environment, allows the instructor to utilize electronic ink to annotate on top of any application window visible on the Tablet PC display screen, including those that play active content like a movie or simulation. WriteOn facilitates a user to annotate over a dynamic application window by activating its virtual transparency surface called the eVellum (electronic vellum). The user can view a movie or an active simulation running in the eVellum background because of its transparent color. The user can deactivate the eVellum to make it invisible by "piercing" it if he/she wishes to access the desktop or an application window under the vellum window. WriteOn provides the instructor with the ability to broadcast a composite of the dynamic lecture content and ink annotations to the students in real-time. The term dynamic lecture contents is meant to indicate that the content being annotated need not be static words on a background, but may also be window contents that are changing in time. Using WriteOn, the students can make their own notes by writing on the eVellum enabled on top of the lecture stream window without losing visibility of the lecture. The instructor/student can save the ink annotations along with base lecture material as a movie file. The ability of WriteOn to improve classroom presentation and student note-taking as shown by initial tests, were pedagogically very useful. However, in order to deploy WriteOn on large scale in classrooms as an active and effective teaching tool of choice, several aspects of the application had to be improved. One aspect of the application that needed improvement was the user interface. The primitive Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the WriteOn tool was not easily usable by instructors and students from non-computer science backgrounds. The second aspect needing improvement was the operational performance of the application in terms of its CPU resource utilization. The WriteOn tool has shown to have operational performance issues during the screen capture process. This research therefore aims to address improvements in the GUI to make it more user friendly and increase the operational performance to the point where the user does not notice degradation of a base lecture application. Incorporation of these improvements has led us to rename the application as WriteOn1.0. WriteOn1.0 implements a picture-based GUI that comprises of two forms: a main form that appears shortly after WriteOn1.0 starts and a toolbar. The WriteOn1.0 toolbar appears in the center of the top edge of the display as soon as the user initiates a task like a screen recording session, by clicking on the appropriate menu button on the main form. The toolbar provides the user, accessibility to perform all the desired activities like annotating, screen recording, presentation broadcast, and piercing of the eVellum by a single-click of the appropriate menu icon. Tool tips that appear when the user points the mouse over a picture icon on the toolbar, explain the task that shall be performed when he/she clicks on the underlying menu icon. WriteOn1.0 introduces a window-like resizable and movable eVellum called the scalable eVellum that it activates in the area of interest specified by the user. Unlike the first implementation of the eVellum which had a fixed location and spanned the entirety of the user's desktop window, the instructor/student define the dimensions of the scalable eVellum and can choose to re-dimension, relocate and pierce through it at any point of time during a session. WriteOn1.0 also introduces the transparent mode of operation wherein the instructor/student, without having to deactivate the scalable eVellum can access any underlying window by a right-click of the mouse on the eVellum surface while the ink annotations are intact on the foreground. WriteOn1.0 addresses the operational performance issues observed during a screen capture session in WriteOn by capturing the activities only in the area of interest of the user for recording and broadcasting. By combining this scheme with a with a lossless screen capture codec called the MSU screen capture codec that has a high-compression ratio and that is optimized for speed for data compression, WriteOn1.0 greatly improves the operational CPU performance of the tool. WriteOn1.0 employs various technologies to implement its features. The improvements to operational performance are implemented by using the MSU screen codec from Moscow State University's Graphics and Media Lab. Microsoft®'s Video for Windows Framework (VfW) and WindowsMedia Player API's are used to realize the module that records the screen activities to an AVI file while DirectShow of DirectX and ConferenceXP API's are used for streaming presentations over a network. WriteOn1.0, with its features like its scalable eVellum, good operational performance and picture-based GUI is aimed at potentially making it a teaching tool of choice across classrooms and changing the method of classroom instruction of courses involving dynamic content. / Master of Science

According to the literature there are still very few researches focusing on the Online Live Instruction in e-Learning. By Integrating IP-Based Video Conferencing System and Full Screen Capture with Live Streaming Broadcast System into an LMS, instructors can provide Online Live Instruction. In this kind of environment, teachers and students can interact together like in conventional classroom. This study explored the process of Online Live Instruction, solutions for the encountered problems are also provided. SOP (Standardized Operation Procedures) are developed on how to conduct Course Material Lecturing and Group Discussion & Summary Report activities. Suggestions about Online Live Instruction for teachers, teaching assistants and students are also included.

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